I recently discovered something interesting about running developer builds on my developer workstation. The builds were running slower on my developer workstation than they were on my lower spec laptop. This was quite surprising as my developer workstation has an i7 CPU running at 2.93 GHz and my laptop has an i5 CPU running at 1.7 GHz.

It turns out that my developer workstation had Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology (EIST) enabled by default. This is a power saving feature of the CPU which will run at approximately half the speed under usual conditions and should automatically step up to full processing power when it is needed. I disabled this feature in my bios and what do you know… my builds were substantially quicker on my developer workstation when compared to my laptop.